My first "social network" was a black screen with letters. Chat rooms, IRC, instant messaging: by the mid-90s I was talking with people in other countries without seeing a single face. Just words. And I learned something I''ve never forgotten: in writing, you are what you write. There''s no tone of voice or smile to save you.
They told us text was dead
Then came YouTube, then Instagram, then TikTok. In marketing we repeated the mantra: "video is king". And it''s true that video dominates attention: studies show most internet traffic is video [1]. But while everyone stared at the screen, something quiet was happening: text remained the backbone. Headlines, subtitles, scripts, captions, searches. Nobody searches Google with a dance.
A 5,000-year-old technology
Writing was born in Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago, with cuneiform marks on clay tablets to keep track of grain and livestock [2]. Ever since, it has been the technology that lets us think beyond our memory. Walter Ong explained it in Orality and Literacy: writing doesn''t just record thought, it restructures it; it lets us analyze, order and build complex ideas [3]. The sociologist in me can''t resist: writing is social infrastructure.
And then AI arrived
Large language models like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini run on… words. They were trained on human text and they respond to human text. For the first time in history, writing clearly is literally a form of programming. Andrej Karpathy, one of AI''s most influential researchers, summed it up in a famous line: "the hottest new programming language is English" [4]. I''d add: Spanish too.
Research backs it up: how you phrase an instruction changes the quality of the answer dramatically. Techniques like asking the model to reason "step by step" measurably improve results [5]. Words aren''t decoration; they''re the controls.
What I see from the agency
- The brief is gold again. A good prompt is a good brief: context, goal, audience, tone and constraints.
- Video starts as text. Every reel that works has a well-written script behind it.
- Search changed, but it''s still text. AI assistants read and summarize written content; if your brand has no clear words online, to AI you barely exist.
- Judgment is human. The machine produces text in seconds; knowing what''s worth saying is still our job.
Advice from a veteran chatter
Read more. Write every day, even a paragraph. Reread before sending. Learn to explain something complex in three sentences. That skill, which used to make you a good student or a good ad person, now also makes you a good collaborator with an artificial intelligence.
We went from clay tablets to chat windows. The tool changes; the power of the written word doesn't.
References
- Sandvine (2023). Global Internet Phenomena Report. Video accounts for most internet traffic.
- Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1996). How Writing Came About. University of Texas Press.
- Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Methuen.
- Karpathy, A. (2023). "The hottest new programming language is English." Post on X, January 2023.
- Wei, J., et al. (2022). Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models. NeurIPS 2022.
